Wednesday, March 10, 2010

James White and the upcoming anti-Calvinist attack by David Allen

It seems that Dr. David L. Allen (dean of the School of Theology, professor of Preaching, and director of the Center of Biblical Preaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) is coming up with a new book entitled Whosoever Wills, to be released next month. Based upon the supposedly biblical "John 3:16 conference of 2008", this book attempts to "offer an alternative to Calvinism in regard to understanding how God works in salvation" (according to the blurb).

Dr. James R. White has chimed in on this issue in his blog here. Given Dr. Allen's abysmal handling of the text of Scripture during the John 3:16 conference, in which the phrase "whosoever wills" is read into the text of Scripture (the Scriptures reads πας ό πιστευων — "all the believing ones", not "whosoever wills"), I am not too optimistic about how the subject would be handled in this book. As it is, Dr. White previewed the book through Google Books, and mentioned that Dr. Allen still disappointingly repeated the same libelous charge of hyper-Calvinism against him, despite and in spite of the fact that even Phil Johnson, who provided the source for the charge in his "A Primer on Hyper-Calvinism" which Allen used as recommended by Neo-Amyraldian Tony Byrne, (inconsistently) denied that White is in fact a hyper-Calvinist.

Of course, this is partly thanks to the Neo-Amyraldians like Tony Byrne who aid the Arminians against the Calvinists. In an even more recent episode around June-July last year 2009, I clashed with Byrne and Ponter again, and it is during this episode that it was revealed that they actually do not regard Hyper-Calvinism as heresy! To which I responded in a blog post here denouncing their intellectualism. After all, what kind of people are they who freely attach labels and charges of heresy at churchmen such as Dr. James White and Dr. Robert Reymond, and yet claim that they are not actually taking such labels and charges seriously as shown by not treating hyper-Calvinism as the heresy it actually is? These Neo-Amyraldians spend vast amounts of time attempting to prove their hobby horse of limited/unlimited atonement theory as being historically reformed, and throw the labels of hyper-Calvinism to those who disagree with them. Yet, they treat the whole thing as a game it seems; not a serious doctrinal issue at all.

The term "hyper-Calvinism" has been thrown around too many times as a one-size-fits-all silencer. After all, who wants to be labeled as extreme? It seems that the definition of the term has devolved into "any system with a higher view of soteriology than me". The Arminians call all Calvinists "hyper", Norm Geisler in his book Chosen But Free called all Dordtian Calvinists (ie historic Calvinists) "hyper", and the Neo-Amyraldians call all high Calvinists "hyper". Oh well...

If these people in the SBC want to revert back to the error of Anabaptism, I sure am not going to stop them. They are welcome to go back to these heterodox systems of thought and embrace the full range of errors the Anabaptists embrace. Just leave the flock alone and stop calling themselves evangelicals would be helpful indeed.

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I am a licentiate under the Presbytery of Southern California of the OPC, with an MDiv. from Westminster Seminary California. I hold on to the Reformed Creeds and Confessions, most notably the Westminster Standards, and as a subsidiary the Three Forms of Unity.